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Standards Program

OGC(R) standards are technical documents that detail interfaces or encodings. Software developers use these documents to build open interfaces and encodings into their products and services. These standards are the main "products" of the Open Geospatial Consortium and have been developed by the membership to address specific interoperability challenges. Ideally, when OGC standards are implemented in products or online services by two different software engineers working independently, the resulting components plug and play, that is, they work together without further debugging.

OGC standards and supporting documents (in the left column on this page) are available to the public at no cost.

OGC Web Services (OWS) are OGC standards created for use in World Wide Web applications.

Any Schemas (xsd, xslt, etc) that support an approved (that is, approved by the OGC membership) OGC standard can be found in the official OGC Schema Repository.

The OGC Technical Committee (TC) has developed an architecture in support of its vision of geospatial technology and data interoperability called the OGC Abstract Specification. The Abstract Specification provides the conceptual foundation for most OGC standard development activities. OGC standards are built and referenced against the Abstract Specification, thus enabling interoperability between different brands and different kinds of spatial processing systems. The Abstract Specification provides a reference model for the development of OGC standards.

The OGC Reference Model (ORM) provides a framework for the ongoing work of the OGC. The ORM describes the OGC Standards Baseline (SB) focusing on the relationships between the OGC standards. The OGC SB consists of the approved OGC Abstract Specification and OGC standards as well as OGC Best Practices documents.

Documents containing discussion of best practices related to the use and/or implementation of an adopted OGC document and for release to the public. Best Practices Documents are an official position of the OGC and thus represent an endorsement of the content of the paper. Schemas for some of these documents can be found at the Best Practices Schema Repository.

Engineering Reports (ERs) are a primary output of OGC Interoperability Program Initiatives (testbeds, pilot projects and interoperability experiments).
ERs can address topics as needed by an initiative including:

Requirements

Specifications which may become the basis for development of an OGC Standard.

Testing Approach and Results (This includes experiment results)

Compliance Test Design

Next Steps and Lessons Learned

ERs represent consensus positions of the initiative participants and sponsors only. ERs become a publicly available document by consensus motion of the Specification Program. An ER does not represent the official position of the OGC nor of the OGC Technical Committee.

Documents that present technology issues being considered in the Working Groups of the Open Geospatial Consortium Technical Committee. Their purpose is to create discussion in the geospatial information industry on a specific topic. Discussion papers are not intended to be targets of acquisition descriptions. These papers do not represent the official position of the Open Geospatial Consortium nor of the OGC Technical Committee. Schemas for some of these documents can be found at the Discussion Paper Schema Repository .

White papers present technology issues of interest to members of the Open Geospatial Consortium. They are voted on by the membership to be approved for public release, but they do not represent official positions of the Open Geospatial Consortium nor of the OGC Technical Committee.